


Hatched Beneath a Toad

by Paper0wl



Series: Rod and Shield [25]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural
Genre: Aliens Made Me Do It, Episode: s02e10 What They Become, Gen, Just Add Ninjas, Ninjas are crazy, Welcome to the Madhouse, administration woes, ninjas want to salt and burn the Index, no I'm not joking about this, running off and saving people, temporal jet lag, things the kids did when mom was gone, trying to run an agency, without administration experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 07:53:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11157495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paper0wl/pseuds/Paper0wl
Summary: Aliens may have only officially visited the Earth (explosively) a few years ago, but they have been littering the planet for millennia. So the devil's daughter (who is trying to manage the agency her people created as soon as she disappeared) is not all that surprised about the burst of non-terrestrial energy. Except it was feedback by Skye.Apparently, turning to stone isn't just a thing for the movies.





	Hatched Beneath a Toad

It took two months back from her temporal detour with universal chaser to finally see what her ninjas had done to the Hub. (Whose bright idea was it that "Archangel" would make a good name for their base? She was the Morningstar Abomination and Heaven pretty much hated her and Gabriel was almost certainly involved.)

 It took not even two hours after that for her ninjas to start lobbing their problems at her head.

 She really hadn't missed that. Or the paperwork. But Bela wasn't dealing with much paperwork while on assassin-sitting duty, so the witch hadn't started throwing that at her. Yet.

 "Yes, I know things would probably run smoother if Peggy came in to help your warriors with the administration, but unless it's an emergency she wants to figure out who she is in the twenty-first century before trying to juggle major responsibilities," she repeated for the umpteenth time since Legion found out _actual Peggy Carter_ was alive and more-or-less unemployed.

 But Kyria had basically planted herself as a wall between Peggy and Legion because some ninjas had somewhat hypocritical views about "personal time."

 Only recently had the two of them gone to see Andrea and Benny and even knowing that Andrea was old it was still a shock when as far as Dawn was concerned the Greek woman had been young and vibrant scant weeks ago.

 (Ironically, it had hurt just as much when she'd realized Andrea was young when the Andrea she knew had been old and tough-as-nails despite her years.)

 It had been worse for Peggy.

 "We don't have enough people experienced with high-level administration of such a large group of disparate people," Madeline said with a deep frown.

 Dawn sighed because, unfortunately, that was true. They'd mostly picked up SHIELD science and research underlings. Which included a bunch of former SHIELD labs and factories, not to mention the ones they'd won back from Hydra. LEGION was not unsubstantially sized. But ninjas? Not so much experience at being the top of a _corporate_ foodchain. Victoria had happily dived right in, and Bela was talking about doing some of it from off-site, but . . . it was mostly Charlie and the Amazons holding everything together. A tech guru and some formerly isolationist warriors did not a functional administration make.

 She could totally understand where Madeline was coming from. The administration and bureaucracy of a secret spy agency off-shoot of the one Peggy helped put together to replace the one she'd worked for during WWII was something Peggy would probably be exceptionally good at.

 "I know. But Peggy's not ready to deal with this right now.She needs time to adjust to being in the wrong time before being thrown back in the deep end." She had (strongly) suggested the temporally displaced woman visit the Roadhouse because Ellen could probably help her get back on her feet; Peggy would do no one any good by coming apart at the seams and having a breakdown. "Besides, the tribe had more than a year to adjust to your own altered circumstances before SHIELD fell and you carved a chunk off the chaos that created, so I hardly -"

 The unfamiliar pulse of energy that whispered over her skin and left her back itchy was fortunately timed to interrupt her before her patience snapped and her structured obstruction devolved into angry, childish name-calling and foot-stomping.

 Which, okay, maybe she was projecting a _little_ of her own temporal breakdown onto Peggy, but she had unfortunately vivid memories of the numerous times she had collapsed in tears while in the wrong year. (There had been another bout of tears since her return, but that was entirely Benny's fault.) And if she was maybe being a little overprotective of the other woman, she tried to give all her ninjas the resources they needed to establish themselves and the loss of SHIELD's authority had made that a trickier prospect.

 But SHIELD really had had to go and that was completely beside the point and she needed to focus on more important things.

 Like that unfamiliar energy pulse.

 "What is it?" Madeline demanded, sounding almost worried. "What's wrong?"

 "I don't know," Dawn said with an absent frown. "I don't think that hit me." It felt more like an echo almost.

 "What didn't hit you?"

 "I don't . . ."

 It wasn't that she didn't know. It was more - it was familiar? It sort of reminded her of the red wave Jane let off when she'd been possessed by the Aether, but it also kind of reminded her of Phil's heartbeat monitor, and it hadn't felt like any of her various sword bearers, or Bela, or even Victoria, who was technically a sword bearer. It really did make her think of Phil, but she knew it _wasn't_ Phil, so -

  _"_ _Skye_ ," she breathed out.

 Grandfather knew her technically-flying-but-essentially-teleportation ability was something she had _yet_ to master (thanks for _all_ the help, Uncle Gabriel), but she had given Skye a feather. And a feather was a mute pledge of responsibility. She may not have any (very minimal) conscious control over her "flying" but feather-pledges weren't conscious; they weren't made lightly because the duty ran so deep as to be mostly instinctual.

 So as soon as she identified the source of the itchy, almost familiar energy, she was there.

 "There" was some sort of clearly non-natural subterranean cavern. "There" was also near enough in proximity for Dawn to determine that Skye was not actually in any immediate danger, despite . . . being turned to stone?

 Okay, that was a new one for her.

 This didn't look like the Chamber of Secrets, even if there were two petrified women and -

 "Who the hell are you?"

 Dawn blinked. Two petrified women, alive within their stone cocoons, and a man with alien energy crystals generating a much less healthy variety of human-eating rock.

 Alrighty then.

 She didn't know who the second woman was, but that was Antoine Triplett, who had spent a considerable amount of time in the company of former agent of SHIELDRA John "secretly the Clairvoyant" Garrett. With LEGION and Phil's fledgling and very-much-clandestine SHIELD not exactly on speaking terms, Dawn didn't know which side of the battle lines Triplett fell on, but dead men told no tales and James and Steve and Peggy would probably all be understandably upset if she let Gabe Jones' grandson die without bothering to determine if he was HYDRA or not.

 Darting forward, she wrapped her fingers around Triplett's neck, reached for the heavy energy twisting its way through him, and _yanked_.

 Eyes wide with surprise, he was pulled _through_ the stone, and she waited just long enough to see him clear of the rocky facsimile before retracing the path she'd taken in.

 The energy underlying those cocoons was about to come to a head (in a non-fatal way) and Dawn seriously doubted this butterfly effect would be friendly to bystanders..

 ***

 She dropped Triplett on arrival, trying to reorient her senses after the disconcerting experience of unaided flight. Her first. Although technically it was a reversal of a sort-of aided flight, so did that qualify as her first?

 "What was that?" Madeline demanded after easily subduing Triplett. He was shoved against the wall with his arms twisted uncomfortably behind his back; the Amazon matron would probably have looked bored if she hadn't been concerned. Dawn _tried_ not to make a habit of disappearing at the drop of a hat. At least this time she hadn't been gone long. _Maybe_ five minutes.

 "One of Phil's agents just triggered an alien energy pulse and because I tied myself to her when I helped to save her life last year, I felt its echo."

 "And of course you just dropped everything to run into the fray," Madeline elaborated, sounding very not-impressed. "And you wonder how you get entangled in so many things."

 "I don't wonder," Dawn objected. "I know - I lost the ability to keep my head down. I can't just do nothing when my friends are in trouble. It's why I ignored Fury and all sense and got involved in New York . . . and then everything kinda spiraled from there."

 "Spiraled. You call disappearing for six months 'spiraled'?"

 "That was not my fault. I got stabbed! There's a reason I avoid angels!"

 "Who the hell are you people?" Triplett demanded, having finally stopped struggling against the Amazon's hold.

 "We are LEGION," Dawn intoned with a straight face.

 "Why didn't you save Skye?"

 "Uh, cause she was fine but that rock-crystal-thing was killing you? You're welcome."

 "The hell she was fine! She was covered in a some sorta rock!"

 Dawn shook her head, summoning her phone to access the ninja boards and ask the Twins to determine Triplett's post-SHIELDRA status. "And her rock cocoon was peripheral to the energy she got hit with. The rock wasn't really doing anything to harm her. Anything that happened was already done and there wasn't anything I could do about it. You, on the other hand? Not compatible with whatever that energy was."

 His eyelid twitched when her phone materialized from nothingness, but otherwise he didn't react. "Say I buy that. How did you even know where we were?"

 She shrugged. "I can track Phil, and to a lesser extent Skye as well. Part of how I was able to keep them stabilized."

 Triplett stared at her. "You're that doctor. The one Coulson called in after Quinn shot Skye. The one who treated him after New York."

 "Dawn. Morrow, yes."

 "Dawn Morrow, huh? If you're Coulson's doctor, who's Morningstar?"

 "Why can't I be both?" she asked rhetorically as Charlie promptly confirmed her growing suspicion that Triplett was one of Phil's ducklings.

 "I don't remember seeing you on the Index."

 "Yes, well, the teleportation is fairly new," she allowed. "It took being stabbed in the shoulder for it to be anything other than theoretical. Hmm. Possibly more like being stabbed, a couple days after being shot, and a couple hours after downloading far too much information. Because I've been stabbed before and it never triggered any flying episodes. Still can't do it reliably, but that's neither here nor there. Madeline, you can let him up. Thank you, but Charlie says he's one of Phil's."

 With a disgruntled shrug the Amazon matron released him, letting Triplett step away from the wall.

 "New abilities or not, you had some flashy tricks with Captain Rogers in DC," he pointed out, rolling his shoulders to work out the aches.

 Dawn grimaced. Charlie had expressed her displeasure at her six month disappearance by finding the single most unflattering still from that Jeep video; Loki had obligingly kept it the background for every computer in the house for weeks on end. "I'm never going to live that down. At least Bela's Facial Fidelius is holding."

 "I'm sorry - Bela's _what?"_

 "Long story. The short version is there's a whole branch of people Fury left off the Index. And no, he's not as dead as his tombstone claims," she added because she actually had no idea how many of Phil's Shieldlings knew Fury was still alive and thought they had a right to know. Especially since she just dropped Triplett into the madness that was LEGION and Fury's (somewhat grudging) approval of ninjas might help this go over less poorly.

 Triplett gave her an irritated and somewhat wary look. "Why would crazy spy-master Fury _deliberately_ leave a group of people _off_ the Index?"

 Dawn let out a laugh of amused disbelief. "I would love to see you call him that to his face. But crazy spy-master or not, he didn't know they existed until Clint brought me in. Andrea had been covering up their existence and then . . . strongly recommended Fury do the same. Not that I really knew that at the time; I only found that out recently. Or . . . a long time ago, depending on how you look at it."

 "Uh-huh." He didn't look convinced in the slightest. "Andrea?"

 "Kormos." A soft smile spread across her face. Mixed feelings on the age differential aside, Andrea _was_ her friend and was also a stubborn old broad who had no problem arguing with Nick Fury. Andrea had run blockades in a yacht before ever before moving in with a vampire, after all.

 He blinked. "Kormos. You're on a first name basis with former Director Kormos. Sure. I suppose I should ask why _she_ left a group of people off the Index," he said sourly.

 "Aside from the fact she's been vocally opposed to the Index since it was first introduced?" Dawn asked with a raised eyebrow.

 Triplett frowned. "She still needs a reason."

 "Long-standing tradition of the Director telling the Council what to do with itself aside, these people existed and were regulated for hundreds of years before SHIELD ever entered the picture. Indexing them would have _explosively_ opened a can of worms. Granted, modern tech's gonna pop the top off sooner or later, but we've already had _aliens_ and we're more cohesive and less vulnerable, so."

 "And?"

 "And what?"

 "Kormos must've had a reason besides maintaining the status quo. Fury never would have gone along otherwise."

 "Oh, well, Fury. He got twitchy at the thought of, like, terrorists getting a hold of us. Which . . . actually sort of happened come to think of it. But it was a long time ago and taken care of besides." Elliot's drugging had been the rare exception that proved the rule. But Murphy wasn't a total ass and she'd (unknowingly) removed the evidence and then Gabriel had (surprisingly helpfully) handled any loose ends. "For the most part, we were well-hidden enough that only the really crazy fringe-group and conspiracy-theorist types suspected we existed. Laying a papertrail? My uncle once breezed past SHIELD security and Fury reacted by making us erase what little paperwork we had. You ever hear the rumors about a department that chased ghosts and disappeared into Area 51?"

 "I think I heard something about that," Triplett said after a pause. "Wasn't that around the time of the thing in New Mexico?"

 Dawn let out a huff of laughter. "Yeah. Thor showed up shortly after the Great Firewall of Ninja and I was so pissed I had desk-duty instead of being involved. Not that it stopped Phil from sending me video to scour."

 The SHIELD agent frowned. "So you had a department? Or . . . what? I thought you were a doctor."

 She made a face. "I'm not so much a doctor as the Weird Alien Science Expert. Which, yes, made me uniquely qualified to be Phil's doctor, but I was an agent. Not so much a field agent as a specialty adjunct."

 "Sure. You still make it sound like you had a - a group of people in SHIELD."

 "There was a department. Or . . . something. NINJAT. No, I'm Not Joking About This. There weren't many ninjas in SHIELD. Or, well," she glanced over at Madeline, who smiled back.

 "We had people in SHIELD, but we didn't make ourselves known until several months after New York," the Amazon matron offered.

 Dawn snorted. "Yeah, well, you've pretty much taken over LEGION, so clearly you've come a long way."

 "And so have you."

 "There weren't many ninjas in the beginning," Dawn said with a shrug. "Fewer in SHIELD, but we coordinated with everyone we could get in touch with."

 "And now we have enough people to support ourselves after establishing independence after SHIELD imploded," Madeline added dryly.

 Dawn just shrugged; LEGION had declared independence without needing any help from her. "Not bad considering NINJAT didn't get started until about ten years after I joined SHIELD."

 "Why so long? What changed?"

 Dawn grimaced. Warding every SHIELD base aside, it had taken awhile for her to abandon her on-going attempts at playing ostrich."There was a rather elaborate long-term plot to . . . hamper the self-correcting nature of the ninja subculture."

 "Translation?" Triplett prompted.

 "Someone tried to bring about the Apocalypse," Madeline supplied bluntly.

 Dawn's grimace deepened. That was overly blunt and implied the attempt was done; also she didn't like to think about what might have happened if she _hadn't_ abandoned her ostrich impression at that time. "We - Kyria - cut the attempt off at the knees and flagged the players to keep anyone else from trying. But Fury wasn't happy with how close the dominoes had been to tipping over, and so folded it all into a department headed by Agent Lux."

 "Orion."

 "Yes."

 "Fury authorized a secret group of un-Indexed enhanced led by an Avenger?"

 "Yes. She was on the books as a department head for a while. Officially, the department was dissolved due to . . . I don't actually remember, it's not important, but I'm sure Bela could tell you if you're curious. Kyria got a desk and so-called supply runs for about a year before New York happened and all chance at anonymity kinda - died."

 "So Orion's got a secret organization that Fury disappeared on Kormos' say-so and I got saved by the agent who's got feathers and lightning and runs around D.C. with a mythical assassin."

 "Barnes is hardly mythical," Madeline retorted.

 His eyes got comically wide. "Is - the Winter Soldier is _here_?"

 Dawn shook her head. "No. He's at another location. His head is - a work in progress."

 Triplett opened his mouth and stopped. Frowned. "Y'know. You're doing an awfully good job of not telling me Kormos' other reason for keeping y'all off the Index."

 Dawn laughed. She could see why Phil liked this one. "That. Yeah. Personal bias. She's what you might call an interested party. She's in a dedicated, long-term relationship with a man who would have been Indexed. But she's been with Benny since before she joined SHIELD, so that was never happening. There's also this odd twist where I saved her life before I ever met her, but . . . that explanation would just confuse you more."

 "You're doing a good job of confusing me as is."

 "Occupational hazard."

 ***

 Bringing Triplett to a conference room where things could (in theory) be explained in an orderly fashion only led to more questions. Which Dawn had known, but ultimately decided it would still be easier to explain in the more contained space of a conference room.

 "This is the Hub," he said accusingly. "This belongs to SHIELD."

 "Belong _ed_ to SHIELD," Madeline corrected sharply.

 "We claimed it after SHIELD went under," Adeline said, coming down the hall to meet them. "We had a better claim than the Army and we got here first."

 Triplett did a double take. "Addy Harper? What in the hell are you doing here?"

 "Good to see you too, Trip," the Amazon and former agent of SHIELD said brightly. "I'll admit I joined SHIELD under false pretenses, seeing how I never admitted I should've been on the Index, but you remember hearing about all the women with the Captain America armbands fighting HYDRA at the Triskelion? That was us. Me and my family."

 Triplett frowned at the his former co-worker and then at Dawn. "That was something you didn't explain. If y'all were SHIELD and sided with Cap, why aren't you helping Director Coulson?"

 "Besides staying off the Index?" Adeline pointed out with an air of one stating that obvious. "The tribe always comes first. We agreed to follow the Morningstar, and after the Hydra reveal _she_ said SHIELD could go fuck itself."

 "Considering I was stressed and pissed at Fury at the time, you all love quoting me on that."

 Adeline flashed a grin. "Hey, Nat was the one to quote you. We all just ran with it because fuck the Index. We don't need no stinkin' Index."

 Dawn sighed. "The Index isn't bad in theory, but -"

 "The practice sucks and ninjas will be Indexed over your dead body?" the Amazon offered with a borderline manic cheerfulness.

 "Pretty much."

 Adeline snorted a laugh before apparently remembering why she tracked them down. "Oh, Madeline, Victoria was getting passive aggressive with Edna."

 "I thought she got her office back?"

 "She did, but Edna's still annoyed about having to move and I think she may have implied some not-so-nice things about the time Victoria was laying low?"

 Madeline pursed her lips. "The Soldier?"

 Adeline shrugged. "I didn't stick around for specifics."

 "I _told_ the tribe my goal to establish a relationship with Barnes."

 Adeline held up her hands. "I don't know what exactly was said."

 "I will find out and I will settle the matter," Madeline warned as she stalked off.

 "Better you then me," Adeline said to her tribal leader's back.

 "What does she want with James?" Dawn asked warily. It wasn't that she didn't trust the tribe. It was just that she was protective of her people, especially the damaged ones. And seeing as she'd been the one to spring him from Hydra and crack through the dam in his head - he was her responsibility and she'd already dropped that ball when she'd disappeared into another year for six months.

 "We're trying to work out the coming cycle. He's one of the ideas being floated."

 "Huh," Dawn said thoughtfully. "You know, I don't know if the serum's genetic."

 "That's the thing, no one does," Adeline exclaimed. "But unlike Rogers, Barnes isn't half bad without it. He's as good looking now as he was before Hydra got to him. And even if his war stories are attributable to the serum, he kept Rogers alive long enough to _get_ to war. So he _was_ intelligent even if he's a little woo-woo nowadays. Fuck Hydra, right? _But_ , we're pretty sure the current mental instabilities _aren't_ genetic. So. Floating."

 "Don't ask," Dawn warned Triplett when he went to ask.

 "Ah - it's probably more of that Not Joking weirdness. Fine. But I gotta know - Bucky Barnes? Is he . . . ?"

 "It's complicated."

 Adeline snorted at the understatement. Dawn shot her a glare. The Amazon laughed. "C'mon, Morningstar. World War Two's regurgitated most of the Hydra subplot and you think you'll get away without explaining to _Gabe Jone's grandson?"_

 She sighed heavily, glaring at the ninja. "I wanted to get through the basic introductions before I got to the complicated bits."

 "We're all complicated," Adeline pointed out.

 "I'm getting that feeling," Triplett admitted.

 "Cause you're smart," Adeline said with a grin.

 "Gee thanks, Addy. You mind cutting to the chase and explaining what on God's green Earth you're all talking about here?"

 "Just another reason why Hydra is evil and twisted and needs to be burned to ashes so we can all dance around the bonfire."

 "Just as bloodthirsty and uninformative as I remember," Phil's agent said dryly.

 Adeline gave a toothy grin. "Don't change a good thing." Triplett snorted and her grin widened. "How far did initial explanations get?"

 "Basics of how LEGION started and why we're not Indexed," Dawn summarized, only too happy to cut into what she suspected was un-cycled Amazon flirtation. "It's a lot and I've got enough to do without handling intake on my own."

 "Totally understandable."

 "Back to my question?"

 "Doesn't Phil have a shrine somewhere? I know I had some stuff on James in that mess of an info-dump." Then she saw the look on his face. "Oh stars. He _does_ have a shrine, doesn't he?" Dawn laughed. "It's the trading cards all over again. You should've seen Phil when they found Steve."

 "The Winter Soldier _really_ is Sgt. Barnes, then?" Triplett asked hesitantly.

 "Yeah. I mean, I'm sure his mental health could give hardened psychologists nightmares, but . . . he is James Buchanan Barnes, born March 10, 1917. Who'd you think he was?"

 "I don't know! A clone or a relative or even, I don't know, plastic surgery maybe. It's . . . unbelievable. And you can't trust the internet," he added.

 "I'm the one who found him and extracted him and wrote the report that ended up on the internet," Dawn reminded him. "I also once ate an overloading nuclear reactor. Don't talk to me about unbelievable."

 That was a very poleaxed look on his face.

 "It's really not any more unbelievable than Rogers surviving a plane crash and sixty-five years as a Capsicle," Adeline pointed out.

 Triplett shook himself. "So Hydra really had a working version of the serum?"

 "They probably tested dozens of failed versions on prisoners during the war," Adeline said with a shrug. "They didn't know what worked and what didn't."

 "Barnes got lucky, then."

 "If that's what you call surviving a several hundred foot fall only to face decades of torture and brainwashing. Zola was probably laughing his ass off the entire time he was working with SHIELD." Dawn had to tamp down her anger before she blew a lightbulb. "I found him and got him out just before everything went to shit."

 "When you say just before -"

 "About a week before D.C."

 "Ow. Yeah."

 "How does a computer die?" Adeline asked suddenly. "We've killed a fair number of Nazi squid, but I've got to say, I'm curious about how you killed a Nazi computer."

 "He blew up his own hard drives in a failed attempt to kill me."

 "But . . . wasn't Barnes with you? After all the effort put into Barnes and he was right there with you, Zola was willing to kill the Winter Soldier?"

 "He tried a back-door sleeper code first. The missile only launched after I countered it."

 "Ah. Asshole."

 "Yeah."

 "Coulson's wall suddenly makes a lot more sense."

 "Wall?"

 "Yeah," Triplett admitted. "Director's got a whole wall covered with maps and science and pictures. Trying to piece together the Soldier's movements. He's . . . got a list of everyone who had a hand in turning Sgt. Barnes into . . . that. Most of 'em are dead."

 "I should've killed Pierce more slowly," Dawn said tightly.

 "As I recall, one of the Insight carriers was about to bring down the building," Adeline pointed out. "Besides, didn't Barnes get to shoot him?"

 Dawn took deep breaths while counting backwards by threes in ancient Sumerian. Pierce and Zola were dead and couldn't hurt anyone anymore. "Yes."

 "Kudos to Coulson on channeling Arya Stark there. We've got a team doing something similar," Adeline admitted.

 "Really?"

 The Amazon gave the SHIELD agent a _look_ , but Triplett really couldn't begin to imagine how bloodthirsty and determined the tribe could get. "LEGION doesn't do half-measures," Dawn said.

 "Only half-explanations," Triplett retorted. "Wait a - so _Bucky Barnes_ was the guy who jumped off the motorcycle?"

 "They were trying to kill Steve. And . . . then I got hit by a car."

 "Charlie made Hydra cover the cost of repairs," Adeline added helpfully.

 Dawn snorted. "It _was_ their fault."

 Trip was looking a little shocky. "This . . . tops aliens by a lot."

 "I'm technically part alien, if that helps," Dawn offered.

 He snorted. "Yeah, I don't really think so, no. So - if you haven't been working with the Director, what've you been doing?"

 "Since the SHIELDRA thing?" Addy asked.

 "Wh - _SHIELDRA?"_

 "Blame Darcy for that. Hunting squid mostly. But we got most of the low hanging fruit, so we're losing momentum and, you know, cohesion, because we know shit about keeping this sort of thing together. Hence, Edna's thing with Victoria, and something like a thousand other little things that keep cropping up. Edna really needs to get her shit straight, because Victoria actually knows something about running an organization like we're got."

 "Alright then," Triplett said, looking overwhelmed but valiantly trying to roll with it all the same. "Wait, Victoria? Old office. Here? Like - no - you can't mean Victoria Hand?"

 "I can, and I do."

 "About this tall? Red highlights? _Killed_ by Garrett, Agent Hand?"

 "Ward shot her, not Garrett," Adeline corrected, "a distinction Bela will not let anyone forget anytime soon, and obviously she isn't dead, but yes."

 "I seem to be quite adept at collecting people who are supposed to be dead," Dawn explained with a smile. "You're the latest."

 " _I'm_ -" Trip shook his head. "I've got it figured now. Y'all are crazy. So much so, you should probably get the water tested."

 Adeline rolled her eyes. "You ain't seen nothing yet," she said with a wry grin.

 Dawn snorted, even as her phone rang. She answered without looking. "Morningstar hotline. What is your emergency?"

 Laughter rang in her ear. "Very nice, Dawn. I don't have an emergency and I'm not actually calling to talk to you, fun as you usually are. Put the kid on the phone."

 Dawn shrugged and put it on speaker, holding it out to her somewhat involuntary guest. "It's for you. Pam, I put you on speaker."

 "You and your phone. Whatever. Hey there, Trip."

 "Pam?" Trip asked in confused recognition. "Pam Barnes, from the Howlie barbecues? I haven't heard from you in - why are you calling me on Morningstar's phone? I just got here! How in the hell are you involved in this?"

 "It's a long story," Pamela said, "but the important thing right now is that Dawn's good people. Gram's grateful to her for looking after James."

 "Your grandma's been dead for fifteen years," Trip countered.

 "I _said_ I was psychic. Not my fault none of you ever believed me."


End file.
